So as to not hijack this thread [THREAD=317022] How did you handle jealousy? [/THREAD]…
Stark Raven Mad commented …
I disagree. I think it might be something learned from parents at such a young age that people don’t even think about it.
I have never experienced jealousy. As a child I recall not understanding how other children could get so upset over having to share something (a toy) or someone (a parent’s attention). The closest I have come is experiencing (mild) envy when someone has something that I can’t have. Even when a woman that I loved wound up in the arms of another man instead of mine, I was never jealous of their relationship but I was envious of him for having her when I could not.
My parents never seemed to show jealousy either (although I don’t know for sure that they never experienced it, only that I never saw it). Even when they got divorced (when I was in my teens), they were reasonable about it and stayed friends afterwards. Because they taught me understanding and empathy as a child, I think that I never learned jealousy. … of course it could be that I’m just genetically deficient.
Well, it might not be built into you, personally, but the studies of identical twins raised separtly show that large parts of our basic personality seem to be built in genetically. I would presume this would include jealousy - I guess you just didn’t get the jealous genes.
jeal·ous
adj.
Fearful or wary of being supplanted; apprehensive of losing affection or position.
Resentful or bitter in rivalry; envious: jealous of the success of others.
Inclined to suspect rivalry.
Having to do with or arising from feelings of envy, apprehension, or bitterness: jealous thoughts.
Vigilant in guarding something: We are jealous of our good name.
Intolerant of disloyalty or infidelity; autocratic: a jealous God.
en·vy
n.
A feeling of discontent and resentment aroused by and in conjunction with desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
The object of such feeling: Their new pool made them the envy of their neighbors.
Obsolete. Malevolence.
For me, the mild envy I have felt matches with the above except there was no resentment attached. Just ‘a feeling of discontent aroused by the desire for the possessions of another’.
Thus I don’t think I am splitting hairs when I say I have never felt ‘resentful or bitter in rivalry’ which is what I think of in regard to jealousy. From what I have seen, there is a component of anger or rage associated with it.
I don’t think of jealousy as ‘Fearful or wary of being supplanted; apprehensive of losing affection’ even though it is listed as a meaning. … unless you added ‘to another’ on the end, in which case it’s also something I have never felt. (I once was scared of losing affection, but not to another, only that she would stop caring about me.)
If you spend much time around very young children, you can see that jealousy can appear at a very early age and appears to be built in. I have a daughter that is 2 1/2 years old and has a huge jealous streak with other kids. She was never taught that at all; quite to the contrary. We are expecting another child in less than a month and we have been trying to combat the jealousy issue before the new baby arrives.
Being a parent has confirmed what other parents have told me. Children are born with a strong basic personality in place. There may be some room to enhance that personality but it is just there for the most part. With my new child I don’t intend to kid myself and think that I can mold it into just anything. Just because your family doesn’t have jealousy issues doesn’t mean that they never got it because it wasn’t taught. They could just be one of those people that were not born with a jealous streak. Me and my two brothers were raised the same way. Two of us are jealous and the other is oblivious to the concept. It wasn’t anything our parents ever did.
It’s tough for me to argue against that as I have never spent any time around young children, but it seems to tie to the ‘nature vs nurture’ argument that people have been having for a very long time… and which I take the side of Nurture 90% of the time. I agree that genetics plays a part in your personality, but I think it is a rather small part (in most cases) and that the differences between siblings, or even between twins, is more due to minor things that happen to them that influences their thinking, usually at an age so young that they don’t even think about it or remember it.
For example, twins raised in seemingly the exact same way, both of them are hungry as infants, one if fed first, and the other percieves it as meaning that their mom loves the first one more. It’s not a concious decision, nor is it an event that is remembered in later life, but it might color everything that ever happens to that child as ze grows up and results in that child growing up jealous of the ‘favored’ sibling. To any neutral observer it may seem like both children are raised evenly, fairly, and identical but the children grow up to be very different because of it.
I meant what I said in the context of sexual jealousy. And I could quote Othello till I was blue in the face, but as far as I know sexual jealousy is a bona fide genetic mechanism (females don’t want their males to consort with other females because this will divert the male’s resources from care to her offspring; males don’t want their females to be having sex with other males because it would mean incurring the risk that he’d have to help raise a child that isn’t his). I’d cite something, but I get all of this from Dawkins’ Selfish Gene and Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen.
Worth reading both. Did you know, for example that most sperm is not made specifically for fertilizing eggs, but instead to function as soldiers to fight off sperm from another male within the female? All this, and more in those books. Especially the second one.
I haven’t spent lots of time around young children, either, but I’ve seen jealousy in its purest form among them. Often it goes beyond jealousy and envy, from just “s/he has that and I want it” to “s/he has that and I am going to take it and not give it back.” Now, is that built-in, or does a child have to learn that behavior?
Over the years I’ve had to deal with people who were jealous of me because I did better than them at school, to the point of them interfering with my life. Later, people have been jealous of my skills and sought to do my career damage, and were even successful.
As for me, I don’t know what jealousy feels like. I can be envious that you bought a new Porsche, but I don’t want it, and I’m not going to key the side of it because I hate you for having what I can’t have. After 10 seconds, the feeling goes away, anyway. My brother and sister suffer from intense jealousy of what seems like everyone and everything. It’s got to where they don’t talk to me anymore because I moved away from them to finally get some peace, while they’re stuck with the messes they have made. My brother even admitted it to me. Well, you want to be that way, pal, have fun. See ya.
I don’t see jealousy as a “nature vs. nurture” argument myself - I see it as a manifestation of an insecure personality who lacks confidence in themselves and their own abilities. A person who is jealous of everyone their SO talks to is jealous because they are fearful of losing their SO, because they don’t think they themselves are good enough to hold onto the SO.
featherlou, are you spying on me? Because you have described me perfectly.
I’m terribly jealous and I have a completely non-jealous and tolerant boyfriend who has to put up with a lot of crap. I don’t know how he does it.
I’ve always been jealous. When I was little it was with regards to toys. I’d scream if my parents tried to get me to share pool toys with other kids. I’d yell, “MINE!”
I’m no longer jealous over possessions. Envious, occasionally, but not angry and jealous. But I do get jealous over boyfriends.
With every boyfriend I’ve had, I’ve been extremely jealous and suspicious, asking for reassurance all the time. I’m 24 and have had boyfriends since I was 15. The first was abusive, and would always make lewd comments about other girls, get mad when I’d get sad about it, and get really mad if he found out I even spoke to another boy. I don’t know if this has coloured my experiences with jealousy.
Make of this what you will, I’d be interested in any opinions.
I’ve never been jealous of my brothers. They’re 6 and 8 years younger than me and the bestestest thing to happen to me ever (unless you count being born in a time and country where women are allowed to become engineers).
I did be jealous of the nanny we got when Mr minus8 was born, though: I had been allowed to help care for Mr minus6 and hadn’t broken him or anything, but now this perfect stranger was taking care of Mr minus8 and would not let me so much as touch him, much less bath him or dress him. Boy was I pissed. Mom told me that she needed the nanny’s help and that the best way I could help, this time, was not by bathing the baby but by letting nanny do it. Oooook… so I would just stand in the bathroom and pass the bottle of shampoo to nanny, instead of trying to pick the baby.
That’s the only instance I remember of being jealous, and it was more along the lines of “this stranger is stealing something that’s MINE” than the paranoid attitude of thinking any woman in the street is out after my guy.
I think that jealousy has three parts:
inherent tendence (genetics)
a trigger (a situation where you see someone as an enemy)
reinforcement or not - which is where the original thread comes in
Oh, and while I’m not jealous in a preemptive kind of way, if you’re asking me to marry you, stop using a condom and get prego 4 times in 4 years, you better keep your dick out of any woman but me. I won’t cut it off, just kick you out so hard your butt will be blue for a month.
How do the authors account for polygamy, current and historical? I’m in an open marriage, and while I sometimes feel anxious or concerned for my husband’s choices, I never feel “angry”, “resentful” or “vigilant in guarding” him, and I’m most certainly not “Intolerant of disloyalty or infidelity”! Obviously, I know many other people who feel the same way, although I concede that we are a minority.
Perhaps the percentage of poly folks (if left unhindered to pursue such a lifestyle and seeing it modeled as children) would become consistent with a genetic recessivity.
I do think that jealousy CAN be taught, and that the mainstream US culture goes a long way towards teaching jealousy - jealousy sells movies, magazines and pretty much every product out there. But you can also teach a left-handed person to write with her right hand, yet we don’t doubt that left-handedness is genetic.
As did I, although I tried to mention other types of jealousy to broaden the category and not limit it to one situation (also because when refering to myself not experiencing it as a child, there were no sexual situations at that point of my life to refer to.)
I certainly have no attachment to my own DNA and if I raised a child fathered by someone else, to me it would be ‘mine’ just as much as one that had my DNA. I’d be the one who raised and taught the child and that would mean more than anything in it’s genetic code.
I have to echo WhyNot in questioning how polyamory and polygamy could exist if it is such a genetic trait? I could see it being something instinctive in the animal world because they are ruled by their instincts, but we are human and our intellect gives us the ability to rule ourselves.
Culturally I think it is something that children have learned from their parents (and society) in the same way that abuse runs in the family. For example, a father rules the house with an iron fist and his sons think that is the way a ‘man’ runs a household so they grow up to do the same. In the past, this was accepted in society as the way a man should act. Nowadays we know better (or should I say that nowadays we think differently) and it is not accepted societally for a man to do that and thus it is something that is being phased out. Children and adults learn other ways to behave and the cycle of passing it on to the next generation is being broken. The difference with jealousy is that most of society still teaches it (not just your parents) and considers it the ‘normal’ thing.
I agree with you featherlou (except for the not nature vs. nuture part) I do see it as a manifestation of an insecure personality. I just happen to think that being insecure is something that is learned in childhood from parents or society and shows itself as jealousy over others.
Actually, WhyNot was wondering if the numbers actually **support *the idea of jealousy as genetic. If a simple statistic of 25% poly vs. 75% monogomous could be determined, then we could begin (not end the discussion, but begin) with the hypothesis that sexual jealousy is a simple dominant/recessive gene situation. 25(ish)% of people have not-brown eyes, worldwide, because blue is a recessive trait.
Not all genetically determined traits are as simple as a single dom/rec pair, and there’s that whole “you CAN teach a non-jealous type to be jealous through overwhelming cultural conditiong” idea of mine factor as well. These, along with the illegal status of poly marriage in many countries, make me think we won’t get clear numbers on the issue. As long as we’re legislating sexuality, it skews the data.
*Yes, I realize not all monogomous relationships involve jealousy, and some poly relationships do involve jealousy. I’m just thinking out loud here. Don’t make me get my disclaimer stick.
Interesting - so you’re taking it back a step further, to why the person became insecure in the first place? Are people born with the tendency to be insecure, or is that something that you develop as a child in a situation that leaves the child feeling unsafe and afraid?
So, I guess one of the questions to be asked here is is jealousy an actual character trait, or is it just a manifestation of other character traits (like insecurity)?